Circling the Lion's Den

Sharing of information among domestic intelligence agencies / Russian experience

Еvery country that suffered large-scale attack in recent years has faced problems in co-ordinating the way the secret services and law-enforcement agencies gathered and analysed information about the preparation of attacks. Solving this problem is nearly impossible without the creation of a dedicated co-ordination structure. And this is something that has not happened in Russia.

In October 2004, Nikolay Patrushev, FSB director, told the Duma that a new co-ordinated centre should be created to help bring together the different departments for the war on terrorism. This plan has yet to be realised.

By August 2004, the situation in the North Caucasus had become confused, with at least three divisions of the national FSB, as well as regional offices, military intelligence and MVD units all operating in the same area. There was little or no co-ordination between them. In November 2004, Dmitry Kozak, the presidential envoy in the North Caucasus, declared:’ Within four years of functioning as a regional operations staff, its right and the responsibility have been regulated by nothing’.

There were two attempts to fix this situation after Beslan. In November 2004, a new counterterrorist grouping was created that drew together the efforts of those FSB, MVD and Military Intelligence Directorate (Glavnoye razvedovatel’noye upravlenie: GRU) units carrying out operational searches in the region. However, the new structure is responsible for tactical (army) intelligence, not prosecutorial intelligence, wich therefore does little to help defeat the terrorist cause.

A second attempt to solve the problemwas creation of a series of 12 operational management groups (Grupy operativnogo upravleniya: GrOU), wich were launched in August 2004 for the North Caucasus region. Each is headed by a colonel from the MVD and act as direct management of military forces for the suppression of subversive and terrorist actions.

Each GrOU includes conventional and special operations troops from the MVD and the ministries if defence and emergency. Each GrOU head has the rank of deputy head of the regional anti-terrorist forces, thereby making them the second highest ranking official in the region after the governor in terms of combating terrorism.

In the event of hostages being taken or insurgents making intrusions into Russian-held territory, the GrOU commander will automatically assume control and has the right to make decisions, independent of control from Moscow. As result, for the first time in the history of the Russian hostage crises, the responsibility for addressing the crisis rested with the regional rather than central authorities.

However, the GrOUs still suffer from the fact that they can only react to terrorist attacks, rather than actually preventing them. This was evident when insurgents attacked Nalchik in October 2005, leaving the GrOU of Kabardino-Balkaria desperately trying to respond to the situation.

Similarly, the concept of a local GrOU commander taking operational control does not always work in practice. While a GrOU was already in place in Nothern Ossetia during the Beslan crisis, Valery Andreev, the local FSB chief, supervised the operations staff - overruling his GrOU counterpart.

During the attack on Nalchik, the GrOU commander was responsible for the situation for only four hours before being superseded by commander of North Caucasian region internal troops.

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